his “stubborn refusal to mount, in this era of artistic coup d’état and herd movement, any bandwagon but that of his own quixotic, excessively tender, strangely anti-Semitic Semitic sensibility,” the author nevertheless had a sneaking fondness for the fashionable. Each August, he deserted his shabby large apartment at 99th and Riverside and rented a cottage on a Massachusetts island whose coves and sandy lanes were crammed with other writers, television producers, museum directors, undersecretaries of State, movie stars whose Forties films were now enjoying a camp revival, old New Masses editors possessively squatting on seaside acreage bought for a song in the Depression, and hordes of those handsome, entertaining, professionless prosperous who fill the chinks between celebrities. It innocently delighted Bech, a child of the urban middle class, to see these luxurious people padding in bare feet along the dirty sidewalks of the island’s one town, or fighting for overpriced groceries in the tiny general store of an up-island hamlet.
